National freedom of information audit 2011

The Newspapers Canada National Freedom of Information Audit is an annual measure of the health of the system across Canada, a chance to compare jurisdictions against one another, and hold those who don’t value openness up in the sun- shine, to encourage the kind of openness that the authors of FOI legislation promised. [...] For audit purposes, a decision was deemed to have been issued on the earliest of the following: the date a final decision on access was issued by the institution; or the date a fee estimate for the request was issued by the institution (with one exception this year in the Ontario-only audit, the audit does not pay fees, nor does it negotiate with institutions to narrow requests to reduce fees—it i [...] These were: • The date the request was received; • The date the agency issued a decision; • The type of decision (full release, partial denial, full denial, no records exist, time extension if beyond the end of the audit period and not replaced by a decision, or fee estimate); • The number of days the institution took to go from receiving the request to issuing a deci¬sion, minus any period during [...] While the results provide a measure of the degree to which institutions have cultures of openness and prioritize freedom of information as an institutional function, the reader should exercise caution in drawing conclusions about any individual institution’s overall record solely from the results of this audit (with the exception of when overall statistics are being used, as in the cases of Ontari [...] Other factors included in the previous grading system, such as the length of extensions of the processing deadline, and size of fee estimates, are included in the discussion sections of the report but no longer incorporated into the grades in order to make them easier to understand.